Changing the author of a post
-
Hi,
I've a number of wordpress posts that were written by different authors, and I want to merge them into a single author. If Google sees that originally the post was rel authored to person A and later we change the author reference to person B, will Google see this as suspicious in any way?
Or does it not matter, as long as it's only attributed to a single author at any one time?
Thanks,
Leigh
-
Thanks Dan. I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO. It's a great plugin. I have the author archive disabled.
-
Leigh
Just making sure you're all set. As far as I know, this will not raise a flag in terms of authorship.
What Williams is talking about is the "author archive" and if you're using an SEO plugin (I recommend Yoast) you'll want to noindex author archives and I even disable them for a single author blog. They end up looking like a duplicate of the main blog page if its a single author blog.
-Dan
-
We don't actually link the author's name to an author page, so I think we're ok there. Thanks for the clarification.
-
Meaning the link to the Author's page where ALL of his articles are available for view. I don't remember what the wordpress link was but basically something like www.wordpress.com/authors_name/
Where it shows all the author's posts, just redirect www.wordpress.com/authors_name/ to www.wordpress.com/new_authors_name/
-
Thanks Willny. Can you clarify what you mean by "Unless the links are going to the author's list of posts"?
-
Won't matter from what I know. Unless the links are going to the author's list of posts(don't forget to redirect to the merged author), it won't really matter.
Changing the author won't give any real affect unless the author is really that authoritative in your niche(very unlikely).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does google penalize you if you post content in french and english on a website
I'm trying to encourage content editors to only post content in either English or French. For example we have a French press release but the team are wanting it on our site in French and English. I thought this would fall under duplicate content rules. Does google penalize you if you post content in French and English on a website?
Content Development | | EstherBrice0 -
I went and added a H1 on my posts, but it is saying the issue was not fixed. Any ideas?
I "thought" I fixed a bunch of missing H1's on my blog, but when recrawled said the issue is still there. Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong or how to fix? I'm not sure what to do other than put in an H1 heading-which I did. Thanks! Jamie
Content Development | | JamieReinhart0 -
Why do Domain Authority Scores vary?
Hello, When I look for bloggers from blogspot and wordpress portals, I find high domain authority scores on moz but if I check their individual sites without blogspot or wordpress I see a low domain score why is this? and is there a harm in selecting such sites? For example hypothetically : www.lizzie.blogspot.co.uk - high domain score & www.lizzie.co.uk - low domain score. Thanks & Regards, Sneha
Content Development | | Sneha.chandan0 -
Shortened page titles and changed urls to match, will this effect my page rankings?
In my recent crawl, I was given a bunch of 200 errors for having titles too long, i rewrote the titles and changed the URLs to match (using wordpress). I was then informed by my boss that changing the URLs like I did (www.website.com/abc ->www.website.com/xyz) may have changed our page rank for those pages and if so i should revert them to the old urls. There are about 14 titles in total that I made these changes to. Would it be quicker to change the URL's to their old names, or better for me to use 301 redirects to point the old urls to the new ones? Will either renaming the urls of the new titled blogs with their old titles or using 301 redirects have better SEO results? Does wordpress automatically make these redirects for me? When I click a link of the old urls I kept saved in a document it still goes to the page.
Content Development | | dclauser0 -
Why did Moz remove thumbs down from blog posts?
You may have already noticed one of the decisions we made when we redesigned the Moz Blog:
Content Development | | Trevor-Klein
We removed thumbs down from the posts. And it was largely in the name of transparency. Wait, HUH? You took away a method of critique, and you're calling that transparent? Yes. Here's the scoop: Thumbs down are one of the most cryptic, uninformative, and often passive-aggressive forms of feedback on the Internet today. By removing the mud from the water, we make the entire picture clearer. It's so easy to see a handful of thumbs down on a post (we would almost always get 1-2), and begin hypothesizing what went wrong. We shouldn't have published that one. The topic was too tangentially relevant; it was too long or too hard to follow. There wasn't enough evidence to support the claims. We could dive into analytics, attempting to glean clues about what happened, but in reality, any one of the following are reasons someone might thumb a post down: The title is confusing The topic is one that I'd like to deny exists (algo update, e.g.) The milk I poured on my cereal this morning had gone bad, and I need to take out this frustration somehow I once had a falling-out with the author of this post I still have a bad taste in my mouth about yesterday's post, which is skewing my thoughts about this one I found one of the comments offensive My finger slipped on my phone while I was trying to thumb this post up (we've confirmed this happens) I didn't like the author's self-promotion in this post I saw the new Star Wars trailer, and am terrified that Disney might think including Jar Jar's long-lost brother in the new film is a good idea. I hate everything right now. Okay, the last one might be a stretch. But you get the idea. Sometimes a post would receive a disproportionate amount of thumbs down simply because the author was proposing an idea that wasn't popular, no matter its importance. One great example: Carson Ward wrote a fabulous post in 2012 titled "Guest Blogging – Enough is Enough," divining what Matt Cutts would write about nearly 17 months later. The response? 45 thumbs down – one of the most maligned posts in the history of the Moz Blog. Authors have emailed us in a tizzy, asking if their thumbs down meant they weren't quite right for the Moz audience, and in replying to them we came to this overarching realization: We didn't know why they got thumbs down, and we couldn't find out with any certainty, but more often than not it just didn't really matter. We were confident in their points and their presentation, and real criticism would nearly always show up in the comments. All that said, we love it when people offer up constructive criticism. We always take it to heart, and hearing directly from you all is the best way we can improve. For that reason among many others, we'll always have the comments below the post. If you feel like a post wasn't up to snuff, please take a moment and tell us why in those threads (please keep it TAGFEE). One last note: Thumbs down remain available on comments, though that's a temporary stop-gap while we work on a more informative system for flagging comments that are offensive, or facepalm-worthy attempts at links (they're nofollowed anyway!), or otherwise inappropriate for our community. We'd love your questions or comments on this change, and hope you're enjoying the new look of the Moz and YouMoz blogs!11 -
Short blog post or Long Blog post, Which works better?
I was thinking, that SEOmoz or other technical SEO blog writes long blog post which cracks my interest when i start reading few lines of the blog post. My mind speak, Wooo! so boring.In SEO what will be best post long or Short? Thanks
Content Development | | tapankumar0 -
What's the best way to include a pdf in your post?
I have some posts where I'd like to include a downloadable pdf....what is the best way seo wise to do this? I was thinking of just putting the file on my server and than just including a link to download it, but I'm thinking there's probably a better way. Any thoughts?
Content Development | | NoahsDad0 -
Changing Text on Pages
For one of my sites I'm in a situation where I have 6 main pages that are for lack of a better word "showcased," one of which being the homepage. The problem is that I am seeing pretty good traffic growth, but my conversions/sales are really weak, and I'm about 95% positive that this is because there is too much information on all of those pages --- each one has about 1500 words or so. The site architecture and link structure on the site is good as out of the couple of hundred pages on the site only 3 of them aren't indexed according to Google webmaster tools. What I want to do is rewrite the text on those six main pages with more of a sales type of feel and limit them to 500-700 words or so. This will have no impact on the link architecture whatsoever, but I'm a bit worried that it will have a negative impact on my continual traffic growth. Actually, I'm not as much concerned about the continual part as the steady new content stream should take care of it, but I would be very concerned if I lost the rankings that I have right now. Granted, those rankings aren't worth as much as they could be because conversions are down, so so it's kind of a catch-22. The question is, how dangerous is what I'm planning on doing? On a side note, my lack of conversions has nothing to do with my description or title tags that show up in the results as they are targeted properly and written for sales. The problem is that the pages, though rich in content, are a bit too rich in content and need to be fixed to work in unison with the descriptions and titles.
Content Development | | RussNauta0